Despite the importance of the subject, the effects of nicotine on the interplay between affect and attentional bias are not clear. This interplay was assessed with a novel design of the Primed Attentional Competition Task (PACT). It included a 200 ms duration emotional priming picture (negative, positive, or neutral) followed by a dual-target picture of two emotional faces side-by-side. A second task included an emotional priming picture followed by a single emotional target picture in a classic affective priming (CAP) task, assessing RT to identify the valence. Smokers completed the tasks in a double-blind repeated measures design wearing a nicotine patch on one day and a placebo patch on the other day. Consistent with hypotheses, nicotine enhanced the effectiveness of positive primes to bias first gaze-fixations (FGFs) toward positive pictures relative to negative pictures and attenuated the effectiveness of negative primes on FGFs towards negative pictures, but did not bias performance in the CAP task where competing target stimuli were not present. These effects of nicotine on affective priming and attentional bias towards competing reinforcers may contribute to smoking motivation.

We tested the hypothesis that the effects of nicotine on affect are moderated by the presence or absence of emotionally positive and negative stimuli and by attentional choice to avoid attending to emotionally negative stimuli. Thirty-two habitual smokers were assigned to tasks allowing attentional freedom to look back and forth at two simultaneously presented pictures, while another 32 habitual smokers viewed single pictures without attentional choice. Picture contents in both tasks were one of four combinations: emotionally negative + neutral, negative + positive, positive + neutral, or neutral + neutral. Participants wore a nicotine patch on one day and placebo patch on another day. Nicotine reduced anxiety most when negative pictures were presented in combination with neutral pictures, but had no effects on anxiety when negative pictures were presented in combination with positive pictures and when negative pictures were not presented. In contrast, nicotine only reduced depressive affect when the participant had attentional choice between positive and negative pictures. Nicotine also enhanced PANAS positive affect and reduced PANAS negative affect, but these effects were not moderated by task manipulations. Overall, the findings support the view that nicotine's ability to reduce specific negative affects is moderated by emotional context and attentional freedom. Nicotine tended to enhance eye-gaze orientation to emotional pictures versus neutral pictures in women, but had no significant effect on eye-gaze in men.

The present study examined citizen satisfaction with police in Anchorage, Alaska. Using data collected through a city-level victimization survey, White and Alaska Native/American Indian perceptions were contrasted, controlling for other relevant factors such as level of neighborhood disorder, prior victimization, and age. Results showed that Alaska Natives/American Indians held more favorable views of the police than White residents. A possible explanation is offered, which takes into account the nature of law enforcement in rural Alaska.